Obsidian is slow, clunky, fiddly, and terrible on mobile. If we preferred Obsidian, we wouldn’t be here.
It works fine for me. A lot depends on where your vault is stored, and whether you have a lot of plugins. But it’s not a text editor; you can’t easily open ad-hoc files and edit them. (You can import then export them.) It’s not designed as a text editor, it’s designed as a text gatherer.
Yes, I like using plain markdown files for two reasons:
- Plain files fit into my existing Finder folder structure which is already organised for how I work. I can open a Finder folder and see all my related documents, no matter what software created them.
- Plain files don’t have hidden metadata, so when I send a file to someone or upload it to some AI website, I know they are only getting the content I know about and not getting unintentionally leaked information.
As someone who’s used the Mac for decades, I’ve tried Obsidian multiple times and find it incredibly confusing for even the simplest use cases. It’s an unintuitive overkill nightmare. Compared to Obsidian, Bear is a delight in its simplicity and an answer to my prayers.